Plan Your Trip Times Picks

A Stormy Port, Peaceful Today

By ALICE FURLAUD;

Published: May 1, 1994

STEPPING out of a station taxi onto the cobblestones of La Rochelle's Vieux Port, we want to exclaim, like the gushing American tourist in the film "Summertime" arriving in the Piazza San Marco, "Don't change a thing!" On our left the water glints in a harborful of tidy yachts and untidy fishing boats: behind us is a panorama of old russet-roofed houses; in front of us are two massive, ancient towers, one on each side of a narrow channel leading to the outer harbor and the Bay of Biscay. As my husband, Max, and I stand among our suitcases and stare, a little boat putt-putts slowly home between these towers, with an oilskinned man in the bow loading lobsters into a tub. The name on its stern is Nenuphar (water lily).

When we order poached grondin, a toothy pink sea monster, in the seafood restaurant Bistro Andre -- it is bad form in La Rochelle to serve any fish with its head cut off -- the waiter asks us eagerly, "Have you seen the new fishing port?" Of course not. What Americans want to see the new anything in a town that so obviously begs the visitor to immerse himself in the Old World?

In fact, moseying around the old arcaded streets between the market and the port, you get the impression that nothing has changed, give or take a few pizza restaurants, since the French Revolution. But La Rochelle, halfway down France's Atlantic coast in the Charente-Maritime department, has had more than the usual European share of changes since Eleanor of Aquitaine created this port to get access to the sea. It has gone from being French to English to French to English to French; from Catholic to Protestant and back to Catholic, from prosperity to penury and back, from war to peace to war. But its 16th-century and 17th-century years as a beleaguered fortified Huguenot stronghold gave the town its lasting identity. And in all the seaport's turbulent history, it is the final defeat in 1628 of the Huguenots by the central government after a 14-month siege that most fascinates the modern citizens of La Rochelle.

"All the horses, dogs, cats and rats were merely slaughtered," goes the dreadful English translation of Maurice Esseul's short history, "La Rochelle."

"As time flew, things were getting worse and worse. But when there was nothing left, people had to live on thistle bread and slugs. Moreover, parchments, saddle leather, boots and others were put into boiling water to try and get something edible out of them."

I am reading this aloud while we eat our way through a huge plateau de fruits de mer, an iced landscape of the delicious local mollusks and crustaceans, not only oysters and mussels but also creatures with names like bigorneaux, palourdes, bulots and petoncles, which lay just beyond the reach of the starving, besieged citizens of La Rochelle.

Cardinal Richelieu, who was in charge of France at the time, personally took charge of the siege. In the Hotel de Ville, the Town Hall, there is a large, lively painting of the red-robed Cardinal directing operations on the mile-and-a-half-long dike, which had been built out of sunken ships, cutting off the Rochelais from seaborne help while a huge army surrounded them on land. Standing in front of the painting, the guide from the tourist bureau tells us with dramatic emphasis that only 5,000 people survived that siege, out of a population of nearly 29,000. She adds that "Richelieu was an old maid: he consoled himself with cats."

The Hotel de Ville is a 15th-century and 16th-century masterpiece of turrets and gargoyles and crenelations. Outside, on the roof, is a peculiar painted ceramic statue of Henry IV, the only Protestant to become King of France (converting to Catholicism for the purpose). It's a copy: the original statue was hurled into the courtyard during the Revolution and smashed.

This was unfair, as Henry ended the so-called religious wars -- eight or nine between 1562 and 1598, depending on how many of the lulls between them you count as peace -- with the Edict of Nantes, giving the Protestants certain political and religious rights. It was after Louis XIV scrapped this charter that boatloads of Rochelais refugees joined the exodus of Huguenots from France. In 1688 some of them founded the town of New Rochelle, N.Y., and their names adorn many an American family tree.

This is a perfect town to explore in the rain: in street after street around the Hotel de Ville the houses are built over arcades on wide sidewalks. I am drawn to the shops at the back, occasionally splashing out into the street to take in the house fronts above, ornamented with window pediments, sculptured faces and beasts, and admire their lace curtains, with patterns of swans, waterfalls, flowers and the like. (Lace curtains are omnipresent in La Rochelle: dainty ones even veil the windows of the dingy pool hall.) These arcades were all built of wood in the 16th century, and replaced with stone in the 17th. On the Grande Rue des Merciers we wonder for a minute why the half-timbered houses look so different from the Tudor ones in England. Looking closely, it is not wooden beams that form the black lines, but slate. Slate squares were fitted over the beams to protect them from the salt air and the rain. This ancient and strange device is, I believe, unique to La Rochelle.